The Big Business with Greenhouse Gas Emissions

“They told us we were selling air”, says Mike [all names have been changed]. That was probably the most honest information the people here received from the company that tells them how to live. Mike lives in the Rufunsa District southeast of Lusaka, the capital of Zambia in southern Africa. His village borders the Lower Zambezi National Park, where elephants, lions, buffalo, zebras, and hippos live between wooded hills and the floodplains of the Zambezi River. Humans are not allowed to dwell in the country’s 20 national parks, but are permitted to settle in neighbouring buffer zones.

The company Biocarbon Partners (BCP) has been running the Lower Zambezi REDD+ project here since 2012 and sells CO2 certificates from it. It is the first REDD+ project in Zambia. The abbreviation stands for Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation and is a mechanism that was set up by the UN. The idea: if it were more lucrative for the countries of the Global South to preserve forests, the climate would be helped. Money flows through the trading of CO2 credits, which companies use to offset their own emissions.

 “Our goal is to avoid 30 million tonnes of greenhouse gas emissions per year by 2030”, promises BCP on its website. It is currently running two REDD+ projects in Zambia. Three million people are set to benefit from them.

The Lower Zambezi REDD+ project protects more than 20 million trees and avoids 1.9 million tonnes of CO2 per year. Some 1,200 households are earning money, and 10 million US dollars have been invested in the communities so far. The figures are illustrated with photos of Zambians pumping water from wells.

In Chilimba, however, only the scorching sun is shining. Mike sits in the shade under the trees with a dozen people affected by the Lower Zambezi REDD+ project. “Our lives have changed”, says Lidia. “We eat differently, farm differently and have lost some of our freedom.” They are no longer allowed to use the forest they used to live from as before.

The community signed a 30-year contract with BCP that prohibits them from felling trees, extracting raw materials, and hunting animals. Their forest is now a de facto no-go area. “We used to be able to just go into the forest, but now armed scouts keep us out”, says Mike. “We can no longer fish or collect mushrooms, fruit, roots, and medicinal plants. We can’t go to our cemeteries and if our animals run into the forest, we’re not allowed to follow them, we have to report it.”

In return for turning their lives upside down, the community receives a share of the income generated by BCP from certificate trading: 150,000 kwacha per year, approximately 5,100 euro, and the money has to be spent on community projects. “Last year, we built two wells for 136,000 kwacha”, says John. BCP would have built a school. “But there aren’t enough chairs and desks, the children sit on the floor”, says Vincent, who teaches here. “But whenever we ask BCP to make improvements, they say: buy it yourselves.”

Nobody knows how much money BCP makes with the certificates. The company, registered in the tax haven of Mauritius, is keeping quiet about it. It will not give an interview.

The state, however, is actually responsible for providing education and water, and so the group gives free rein to their anger — about the government, about development organizations that come and go and leave behind only half-finished or useless things like the toilets that don’t work, about the people who take away their forest and treat them like criminals. “Last year they found a dead lion and blamed us”, says Mike angrily. “It wasn’t us. But they took 60,000 kwacha from us out of the 150,000 kwacha.”

Around 1,500 people live in Chilimba. Calculated down, they receive 100 kwacha per person per year. That is around 3.40 euro. Nobody knows how much money BCP makes with the certificates. The company, registered in the tax haven of Mauritius, is keeping quiet about it. It will not give an interview.

“We don’t know what they measure. They just say that others don’t have good air and are grateful to us for protecting the forest”, says Vincent. The oil company BP, for example, is grateful: it buys CO2 certificates from the Lower Zambezi REDD+ project and promises to achieve its “net zero” target by 2050.

This gift for the biggest polluters was presented at the 2015 climate summit: Article 6 of the Paris Agreement allows bilateral trading in carbon credits and provides for the creation of a global voluntary carbon market for companies. This means that companies do not have to reduce their CO2 emissions; instead, they can buy carbon offsets and become climate-neutral on paper. At the 2021 climate summit in Glasgow, a fifth of the world’s 2,000 largest companies announced that they would achieve “net zero” by 2050 with carbon credits. It’s a lucrative business: the market almost quadrupled from 520 million dollars in 2020 to 2.4 billion in 2023.

“As if you could put carbon in a sack and trade it”, says George and laughs. We are sitting on the sandy village road of Mpanshya, looking out at the fiery red blossoming flamboyant trees. The community lies between the Lower Zambezi and South Luangwa National Parks. Ten years ago, BCP launched the Luangwa Community Forest Project in the Rufunsa Game Management Area. These are buffer zones in which villages and community forests are located, along with lodges for trophy hunters. While local communities are penalized if there are dead lions in the project area, rich whites are allowed to shoot as many lions as their wallets will allow. “Only a few benefit from the compensation, the needs of the communities are not being met”, says George. Some want to spend the money on tin roofs, others on wells or fertilizer. “There’s a lot of arguing.”

The money is not enough for villages to develop economically, also because they pay the scouts themselves from their money from the conservation project. An outrageous perpetrator-victim reversal. Local communities are criminalized as poachers, the most vulnerable are restricted and set against each other, while corporations can continue their work of destruction with pollution rights: one of the world’s largest oil companies, which contributes to the climate crisis, is fudging its CO2 balance sheet in the Luangwa Community Forest Project.

BCP partners include the Italian oil giant Eni, which produces oil and gas in Angola, Congo and Mozambique. In 2021 and 2022, Eni purchased more than 3 million certificates here, for example to export liquefied natural gas to Taiwan in a “climate-neutral” way. By 2050, Eni wants to offset 40 million tonnes of CO2 every year. In other words: Eni buys the licence to be able to emit these tonnes in real terms.

Ten million tonnes of CO2 have been saved by the Luangwa Community Forest Project, writes BCP. Sounds huge? Not for Thales West: “It doesn’t really have any impact”, says the Professor of Environmental Geography, who researches carbon markets at the Free University of Amsterdam. Whether and how much CO2 forest conservation projects store is pure speculation. The operators merely estimate how much would have been deforested without their projects.

Rich countries can continue to avoid meaningful contributions to climate financing if poor countries such as Zambia sell carbon offsets.

To do this, companies such as BCP look for a reference area that is structurally similar to the planned project, where deforestation has taken place, is planned, or is likely to happen. Based on this reference scenario, they calculate the amount of CO2 credits they sell. However, a Greenpeace study shows that the reference area is not comparable to the Luangwa Community Forest Project — neither in terms of climate, population density, or vegetation.

Both BCP projects are certified by Verra. The US organization is the largest certifier of carbon offsets. Verra “controls” 75 percent of the carbon certificates traded worldwide. An international team examined 29 forest-protection projects certified by Verra and came to the conclusion that 90 percent of the certificates were worthless. Following the growing criticism, Verra has put projects on hold and credits from forest protection projects have declined. On the other hand, the number of plantations for carbon markets in the Global South has tripled. The consequences are identical: according to the Landmatrix database, “green grabbing” is on the rise. A quarter of critical land transactions relate to agrofuels, green energy, compensation, and nature conservation projects.

The Land Squeeze study by the International Panel of Experts on Sustainable Food Systems also identifies carbon offsets as a major driver of land conflicts. “The rush for land for carbon offset projects, nature conservation or greenhouse gas storage projects is growing rapidly. The markets for carbon-offset projects rarely deliver any real greenhouse gas savings and the huge land deals take control of the land away from local communities, who can no longer use it. It’s the corporations that make the profit, it’s the local people who lose out, and not just in Zambia”, says Jan Urhahn, head of the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation’s Food Sovereignty programme.

Nevertheless, carbon markets are a priority at COP29 in Baku. Article 6 of the Paris Agreement had not yet been finalized: Rules for voluntary and bilateral trading of certificates were missing. These were surprisingly adopted very early in a controversial process in Azerbaijan. But what supporters are celebrating as a success is fatal for the Global South. Chief negotiator for COP29 Yalchin Rafiyev said with regard to Article 6: “This will be a game-changing tool to direct resources to the developing world and help us save up to 250 billion dollars a year when implementing our climate plans.”

In other words, rich countries can continue to avoid meaningful contributions to climate financing if poor countries such as Zambia sell carbon offsets. However, this means that these countries are not allowed to offset their forests in order to achieve their own climate targets. They now have to buy expensive certificates themselves, fears Joe Romm from the University of Pennsylvania: “The richer countries pay to reduce their original climate targets, while shifting the burden onto the poorer countries, which have to increase their original targets.” Carbon colonialism instead of climate justice.

This article was first published in a slightly modified form in der Freitag in cooperation with the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation. Translated by Jan Urhahn.